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I helped start SRU-Electronics over 25 years ago and am very proud of what we have accomplished. It has grown significantly since then with close to 40 research networks across the sciences and new content and functionality being added every week.

I have been blogging since 1995. I’ve been able to write hundreds of blog posts that have helped thousands of businesses and bloggers, and I’ve leveraged that content into a full-time career as a Brand Evangelist, marketing consultant and author. Thanks to my blog, and the fact that I am a 100% work from home business, I have been able to move whenever and wherever I want, as well as work from Paris, Barcelona, Florida, California, and countless other destinations. Throughout this guide I walk you through best practices and provide essential strategies and tactics for your success. I also recommend specific tools and services that I’ve used, some of which are affiliate links – those cost you nothing more and, in fact, in some instances I’ve negotiated an even better deal for you. We’re going to cover a lot of ground. I’d strongly recommend that you hit CTRL – D right now to bookmark this resource so that you can come back to it later. You can also download it as a PDF for free here:

A new type of social management platform has emerged- one that creates the intelligent social workflow and enables you to ideate, analyze and compare the channels, content, and campagns of thousands of brands (including your own).

What Is Blogging?

Blogging started when people first began using websites to journal their activities and ideas. The term blog came from “Web Log” and so the initial blogs were quite personal in nature.

That doesn’t have to be the case today.

Blogs are currently used in much the same way normal websites are used: to educate site visitors on a particular topic.

One difference though between what one might call “normal” web pages and a blog is that a blog is expected to have new content added to it regularly, and thus the blogging system should facilitate that.

While most blogs might have comments and tags and other frills… it’s that regular addition of new content which is what really defines and separates the blog from a static site.

Even the posts themselves and the format they’re in matters little. It’s all just content. Here on The Social Media Hat, I use “pages” and “blog posts” and “articles” and “stories” to separate in my own mind and site organization what I’m publishing. But the normal site visitor likely wouldn’t know the difference.

We will get into some of those details very shortly. For now, what’s important is to understand that if you’re going to start a blog, that means that you’re going to be creating a website that you will need to update regularly with new information.

It’s an important point, because that represents a commitment on your part that you have to stick with to achieve success. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to set up a blog, publish one post, and suddenly get droves of traffic that drive crazy amounts of passive revenue.

That’s a pipe dream.

Rather, know that it will take you time to develop an audience. You’re likely going to have to write a lot of blog posts and create a great deal of content, over a lengthy period of time.

How much and how long will depend a great deal on your individual goals. Are you doing this for fun? Are you hoping to make a little money on the side? Or are you hoping to turn your blog and interests into a full time business and career?

How To Make A Blog A Business?

Which leads us to a very important consideration: how to make money blogging.

If you’re blogging for fun, or already have a plan to monetize your blog, feel free to skip this section. If, however, you’re definitely interested in understanding how people can make thousands of dollars a month from their blog, I have a brief introduction for you.

There are actually a myriad of ways that people can make money from a blog and website, but at a high level, most methods fall into a few basic categories.

Advertising

One of the most common ways to monetize a blog is to add advertising. Google AdSense, for example, will generate dynamic ads in whatever spaces you specify that is related to your content and therefore more likely to be of interest to visitors.

In order to see good revenue from advertising, you’ll need to establish growing levels of traffic. It’s poor SEO to fill a brand new site with advertising, and individual advertisers will likely only be interested in working with established brands, so don’t plan to implement advertising right away.

Sell Products

Another common way to monetize a site or blog is to sell products. These might be digital products that you’ve created or resell, or physical products. Depending on the product, you may need to integrate a shopping cart application into your site, or you might be able to refer visitors and interested buyers to a separate site (or just use PayPal buttons, for instance).

While you can certainly launch your blog with products to sell (particularly if that’s the point of your business), keep in mind that as a new business and blogger, you still need to establish a reputation, so keep your expectations reasonable at first.

Sell Services

While selling services may not be the typical blogger’s primary focus, it certainly does offer a lucrative option, particularly if you’re simultaneously working to develop passive revenue streams.

In other words, while you’re working on building traffic and slowly earning more from advertising or other streams, you can still make a great living using your blog content to establish your authority in your niche and offer your services to other people. You can promote them directly on your site, as well as through third-party sites like Fiverr.com or Guru.com.

Affiliate Recommendations

Finally, what’s typically one of the most effective ways for bloggers to make money is through affiliate recommendations and sales.

The arrangement is simple. You create your blogging site around a central theme, identify one or more businesses that are already selling products or services which serve that niche, and then you promote them on your site. As an affiliate, you are provided a custom link to use to refer readers which, when clicked, automatically associates that visitor and customer with you. You get credit for anything they purchase and earn a commission.

Like all of the other methods, this is by no means an easy path to untold riches. You still need to develop an audience and establish your authority. And when you want to promote an affiliate product, you’re going to have to really sell it and demonstrate value, just as if you were selling your own product or service.

The beauty though is that fulfilment is 100% someone else’s responsibility. And if you’re able to create some really effective systems for funneling readers into the recommended products, you’ll begin to see real monthly earnings – enough to build a real living off of.

I’ll outline what those systems look like for you later on.

While it’s usually best to work on developing a rich archive of content and an engaged audience first, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a plan for how you’re going to earn money.

Who Is Your Blog For?

There are three main areas of concern that need to be addressed before you start blogging and then continuously while you’re blogging, and those are Focus, Targeting and Metrics.

Blogging Focus

Focus is important in order to keep your blog content topics as narrow as possible. When you stray off into posts that are off-topic, they’re usually a waste of time. It seems counter-intuitive to keep narrowing and narrowing the focus of what you’re writing about – it may seem like you’re limiting your audience. But the fact is, a highly focused set of topics will make it easier for you to figure out what you need to write about, and grow a highly interested audience.

I started blogging when I first opened my web dev business. At the time, I thought that writing about anything business-related would be good for my audience and great for my blog. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Those early posts that I wrote garnered no traffic, no leads, and no sales, and therefore were completely worthless.

What I lacked was an understanding of the connection between the content I needed to write and the audience I was trying to reach.

Blogging Targeting

This is why it’s a good idea to develop one or more personas for your blog and business.

A persona is simply a made-up person that typifies your ideal or target audience. You might include demographic or geographic data if it makes sense to do so, but the more important features are usually their fears, issues, concerns, needs and goals.

If you can gain an understanding of what your audience needs, and how they’re limited, you can create a picture for yourself of how you can help them.

Blogging Analytics

Once you’ve established one or more personas and have started to create content that you think is a better fit for them, you can use your analytics to confirm that.

Google Analytics will help you see how your site content performs, and all of the major social networks also offer reporting options to help you gauge the effectiveness of your social activity as well.

In fact, whenever you’re on the fence about whether a particular topic is a good one, it’s often best to test it with a short social media post rather than invest the time it takes to write a blog post. If the social post resonates with your audience, you know it’s safe to proceed with the longer article.

Example: Peg Fitzpatrick

A great example of a blogger with excellent focus is Peg Fitzpatrick. Peg is a marketing consultant and speaker, so she’s targeting small to medium business owners and brands with her content.

She knows that by sharing detailed blog posts about various aspects of social media marketing, she can position herself as an authority. She also knows that the people interested in her content will, for the most part, be too busy to read all of her articles.

There will always be people who need more help than you can provide in a blog post and will be willing to pay for your expertise.

How To Find Your Blogging Voice

One area that you may be wondering about is your “Voice.” Maybe you’ve heard other bloggers talk about it. What is it, and how do you get it?

Your voice with regard to writing and blogging is actually very akin to your spoken voice. By that I mean, when you and I are sitting in a cafe having coffee and talking about our career paths, you hear me speaking.

Not only do you hear the words, you hear things like intonation, cadence, stress, emotion, passion, confidence. You learn just as much from the way that I speak as from what I say.

Your writing is the same way. Sure, the typed words are important for facilitating what it is you want to communicate.

But there’s more.

Which words do I choose to use? Which words do I stress? Where do I choose to start new paragraphs or use short sentences.

Style.

These are things that, when combined, come together to be “uniquely you.”

But it also happens over time. When you begin to write your first blog post you may not have a clear idea of how you want to talk to your readers.

You may not know if you want to be funny or clever or even shocking.

Of course, whatever style you choose should usually reflect who you are outside of your writing. Most of my friends and colleagues who “met” me through my blog and then we meet face-to-face later find that I write almost exactly like I speak.

What style will you choose?

More important, how will you go about finding that style?

Yes, like so many other aspects of blogging, your voice is going to take time to develop. Not only do you need more experience to be able to discern what your voice is, you will also need practice writing with that voice in order to make sure that everything you write is flush with your style.

Here are a few tips to get started:

Read your writing out loud. Ken Evoy showed me the power of this technique and it’s truly amazing. Not only will you be a better editor of your own work, you’ll really “hear” the voice that you’ve portrayed in your writing and may find yourself loving what you’ve drafted, or saying, “yuck!” out loud.

Learn the rules of grammar. You don’t want to get stuck on spelling & grammar, and you definitely don’t want your readers to get stuck. Let them focus on what you’re trying to say, rather than any confusing mistakes you might have made.

Know when to break the rules. Blog posts are not college research papers. It’s OK to break the rules if done deliberately, with purpose for the reader.

Write from your own knowledge & passion. When your writing comes from your heart & mind, rather than a regurgitation of notes and research, your personality can come out clearly.

While we may not have spent a lot of time talking about your blogging voice, it is something I advise you to think about quite a bit. This is one of the best ways you and your blog will stand out.

How NOT To Start A Blog

Before we jump into the nitty gritty of what you need to do to start your blog, let me address and dissuade you from a few common mistakes and misperceptions about blogging options.

I Can Blog Using Social Media

This is fallacy #1. Some people will tell you that all you really need is a Facebook Page and you can just post all of your content there.

While you do need a Facebook Page, and we’ll be talking about that later on, it is not a substitute for a blog or business website.

First, your Facebook Page lives within Facebook which means you have no control over the environment. What’s in the sidebar and footer – what’s around your content – has nothing to do with your brand or business.

On your blog, however, you can use that space to promote your own business and lead your readers into more fruitful activities.

Second, and this cannot be stressed enough, you do not own your Facebook Page. Facebook can shut down your Page at any time, with no warning, and with no promises to reinstate it even if it was a mistake.

While most bloggers and businesses have little to fear with regard to losing any of their social profiles, is that really a risk you want to take?

I Can Blog Using A Free Website

What if, instead of a Facebook Page, you opted for a free WordPress blog. That should be OK, right? No!

Again, just as with a Facebook Page, anything you’re getting for free means that you aren’t paying for or owning that thing. If you’re going to invest countless hours publishing hundreds of blog posts, do you really want to rely on a free service for that?

But there’s a deeper, psychological issue at play here.

If you want your new blog to be taken seriously, you cannot opt for a free website. No matter how hard you try, it will be obvious to every single reader that you are either too cheap to pay for hosting, or too lazy to try.

Either way, that leaves a sour impression and they’re not likely to be interested in learning more from you.

So do yourself a favor and follow the following guidelines to the tee!

How To Start A Blog

From a technical perspective, you need three things to start a blog: Domain Name, Hosting, Blog Platform.

Domain Name

Your domain name will be your blog’s address on the web. My blog, for instance, uses the domain name BloggingBrute.com. There are two parts to that domain name: the left label, which is unique to you and your blog, and the right label, which is referred to as the top-level domain or extension.

While there are many top-level domains to choose from (.net or .info, for instance), it is ideal to use .com since that is the default extension, and considered to be the most authoritative.

Selecting a domain name thus requires finding a combination of an available left label + top-level domain. No easy task! To be frank, finding an available .com is often frustrating and time-consuming.

My advice: Don’t settle on a name for your business until you’ve found the perfect domain name.

Additional domain name selection tips:

Use a .com domain name if at all possible.

Do not invest in a Premium domain name (one currently owned by someone else) unless you have an established brand.

Avoid numbers or punctuation.

Domain names are not case sensitive, but you can write them that way if you use multiple words to help with readability, like TheSocialMediaHat.com as opposed to thesocialmediahat.com.

Check the availability of related usernames on the top social networks (i.e. Facebook & Twitter) to ensure brand symmetry.

Make a decision on your domain name within 48 hours of finding the perfect one, to avoid “squatters” buying it before you do.

Once you’ve found the perfect domain name, don’t buy it just yet. You can usually get it for free with a hosting package, which we’ll talk about next.

Blog Hosting

Hosting is the physical location of your blog and website – where your files and folders and data live – and it represents one of the business costs of maintaining a blog. The fees range from a few dollars a month up to the hundreds of dollars a month, depending on your site’s needs.

For new bloggers, the good news is you can start relatively inexpensively, and upgrade as needed. Over time, as your site gains more traffic and interest, you’ll need to upgrade your hosting. But that’s usually a nice problem to have!

Dedicated – The best hosting option; this kind offers you a complete server solely for your website and visitors. The performance is the best, but the cost mirrors that.

As I mentioned, new bloggers can certainly start with a shared hosting account, and my recommendation is BlueHost. The hosting plans are inexpensive, reliable, and offer easy installation of WordPress, which we’ll get to in a moment.

And note that I’ve partnered with Bluehost to give you an even deeper discount on your first hosting package, just to help you get started!

You’ll see the special deal that I’ve arranged. Click on Get Started Now. Powering Over 10 Million Websites Worldwide

This network works simple. We like the page invite all our friends, partners, clients,... and we share the advertisement. Now the page is growing rapidly, which means every minute someone writes an ad on the page. That means your advertising just got better. Feel free to check out everything that's shared as well because you want to treat people like you want to be treated yourself. Now there is more ways to advertise with this blog and you can easily find that on page itself.

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A new type of social management platform has emerged - one that creates intelligent social workflow and enables you to ideate, analyze and compare the channels, content, and campaigns of thousands of brands (including your own). While the traditional platforms are important and likely more well known, it's the later that pulls everything togheter and help answer the critical questions.

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Stefan has over 20 years of senior level international search experience and has completed numerous senior level assignments with a principal focus on the industrial and services sector for companies ranging from early stage entrepreneurial ventures to large scale corporations.

Stefan has concentration on the energy, automotive, manufacturing and process industries as well as on services to industrial. He has also conducted talent audit for clients to support change management.

Stefan brings to his search practice based on her industry experience and knowledge, fresh contacts and perspective, and sensitivity to the needs and culture of both clients and candidates.

He personally leads each of her searches with a “hands-on” approach that has resulted in search delivery and completion well above the industry.

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I believe that in the next 50 years the concept of large corporate employing people will die,

the combination of all the 30 something being made redundant, the realisation that their

experience is now becoming a major commodity and their need to balance work and life

will stop them looking for full time jobs. They will only want contract jobs or treat fulltime

jobs as contracts.

I therefore hope that the successful corporate of the future will be large groupings of people

that form into work based communities as and when the need arises. I hope the days of the

large corporate employing thousands of people will be gone in the next 100 years!

I don't they will have a choice; the best people will simply not take a fulltime job.

FranceWeb,e-GlobalNetWork® is the largest sociotechnical system humankind has ever seen. It has changed the way we interact, learn and innovate. Almost daily it appears to change, improve and increase its hold on us.In fact , it has been created for anyone interested in virtual worlds and social networks whether commercialy, because you want to explore the possibilities such environments present, or for academic curiosity. It is the result of a major collaborative effort by members of the same business faculty, to identify and define solutions for the most frequently occuring issues and problems for small, medium and large businesses as well as for non-profit organisations.